For Love or Money: Social vs Monetary Reward

Social Status and cash activate the same reward centre in the brain. That’s what two papers in the latest Neuron journal (Volume 58, Issue 2) are saying. I’m always very interested by cognitive research attempting to explain how certain activities can affect human behavior.

The article “Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans” by Dr. Caroline Zink and colleagues explains how information about social status activated the same brain regions.

The second article “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum” by Dr. Norihiro Sadato supports how reputation affects people in the same way as money does.

A subscription is required to read those articles, but they were summarized in ABC Science article “Praise or Cash? Your brain doesn’t care“.

Personal Story:

These studies support my own view on the topic. Last month I discussed the impact of the size of a money bonus on performance. It would be very interesting to see a similar experiment where some a group receive a lot of encouragement and the other group receives no praise at all, to compare their performance.

One of my previous employers, as many employers do, offered an annual performance bonus. This bonus was a percentage of the annual salary, but every employee received a very similar bonus. Employees developed a sense of entitlement to this bonus, and always thought they had met all their performance objectives and deserved the full amount. I’m just giving this context to illustrate how the cash incentive most likely did not have a positive impact on performance.

The employer, aware of this problem, introduced a “praise” program, consisting of recognizing employees who had made a significant contribution. Managers were encouraged to simply give a “Thank You” card to exceptional employees. I have no idea how this program affected performance… But it’s impact on motivation was priceless.

Employees receiving these “praises” would shine for weeks. Common sense tells me that motivation can easily be correlated to performance. I can safely say that the thank you notes I received from colleagues I had helped during evenings and weekends really motivated me to keep working hard – there is nothing like feeling appreciated!

Another Story on Social Status

A few weeks ago I read an article about how job titles could be used to motivate employees, even if no pay increase is associated with the new title. I have a friend who had his job title changed from “Business Dev Manager” to “Manager, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Development”. He’s been jumping up and down since he got this “promotion”. His reasons for being so happy: the title is unique, distinguishes him from his peers, and sounds better from his perspective.

Do Big Money Bonuses Really Increase Job Performance?

I came across an interesting study in the “PsyBlog” about the impact of large bonuses on job performance. In this experiment, professor Dan Ariely went to India and recruited [poor] local people to accomplish several tasks, offering a performance bonus equivalent to up to a month’s salary. In 8 of the 9 tasks, the promise of a large bonus significantly decreased people’s performance.

The summary of the paper on the PsyBlog seemed a bit counter-intuitive. Most companies around the world would most likely not have some flavor of a pay-for-performance program if a bonus was actually decreasing performance.

So what is happening? On one hand, I think that if the bonus is very high, participants could have been really stressed out about the task and not performing as well because of that pressure. It is also possible that performance decreased because participants did not actually believe they would receive the bonus for a variety of reasons – sometimes when only a certain number of people can receive the max bonus, participants feel they don’t have a chance to perform at the required level and behave accordingly. Even if there is no maximum number of participants who can receive the largest bonus, the performance required to get the bonus could be perceived as being unattainable or not worth it.

The relative value of bonuses versus the effort required to obtain them is another factor which could affect the participant’s behavior. If working exceedingly hard is required to get the max bonus but that only a moderate amount of work is required to get a bonus which is only slightly inferior, many participants could be settling for the smaller bonus.

I spent some time looking for other papers on this topic and found a few other possible explanations. The “crowding out” theory supports the hypothesis that incentive pay decreases employees’ motivation to perform up to abilities. The explanation generally given for this is that the introduction of an obligatory amount of output to produce is often considered by employees as a signal of distrust. The papers I found discussing the crowding theory are: Titmuss (1970), Rothe(1970), Gneezy and Rustichini (2000), and McNabb and Whitfield (2003). Papers by Kruse (1992), and Ichniowski and Shaw (2003) “prove” that incentive pay positively affects employees’ effort.

As for me, based on my own observations and “empirical evidence”, I will side with Kruse, Ichniowski and Shaw to say that incentive pay (if used properly) can positively affect employees’ performance.

Which Sales Incentive Compensation Management Software is Right for you?

Gartner published an excellent research in July 2007 called “Market Scope for Sales Incentive Compensation Management Software”. This research discusses several of the sales incentive compensation management offerings and is surprisingly free.

The offerings evaluated are:
ACTEK
Callidus Software – TrueComp
Centive
Oracle (E-Business Suite)
Practique Associates
SAP
Synygy
Trilogy – Versata
Varicent Software
Westport Software Group
Xactly

The evaluation criteria were: Overall Viability, Customer Experience, Product/Service and Market Responsiveness. Results of the study are summarized in this table:

This study is a good start to help identify the prominent vendors of Incentive Compensation Management offerings. The best choice would be determined on a case-by-case basis since some of these vendors focus on a particular company size (number of payees), on a particular technology and in some cases on specific industries.

I would also like to highlight that several more vendors exist but were excluded from the study because they did not meet specific criteria including having at least 16 clients, of which at least 12 using the system in production, and with enough cash to fund at least one year of business operations.